Roberto Bolaño: 2666

Roberto Bolaño spent most of his life as a broke, nomadic poet wandering through South America, Mexico and Europe. A political exile from his home country Chile, he spearheaded the notorious infrarealist poetry movement in Mexico. He eventually left Latin America for Europe, where he lived the rest of his life. He was only 50 when he died of liver failure in 2003.

2666 is Roberto Bolaño’s last and most gut-wrenching novel, which he was still revising up to the last year of his life. The book is made up of 5 parts, and the separate narratives all weave around Santa Teresa, a city based on Ciudad Juarez in Northern Mexico where over four hundred murders of young women have taken place since 1993, and few have been solved.

I will confess I have never heard of this writer until recently, with the net buzz — and it is big — for this final novel, 2666.